Free Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History by Andrew Carroll

Quakers arrived at Boston upon no other account than to disperse their pernicious opinions had they not been prevented by the prudent care of that Government.… We therefore make it our request that you as well as the Rest of the Colonies take such order herein that Your Neighbors may be freed from that Danger; That you Remove those Quakers that have been Received, and for the future prohibit their coming amongst you.
    —From a September 12, 1657, letter by the Commissioners of the United Colonies to Rhode Island’s governors, who ultimately refused the request on the grounds that laws enacted against the Quakers only encouraged them. “They delight to be persecuted,” Rhode Island replied
.
    IN THE FAMILY of American states, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (the state’s official name) is the runt of the brood. Wyoming is the least populated, but Rhode Island is geographicallythe smallest. And like many diminutive siblings, what the Ocean State lacks in physical brawn it compensates for in bravado and scrappy determination. Rhode Island was first to declare independence from Great Britain and boasts having fired the earliest shots of the Revolution; on June 9, 1772, almost three years before Massachusetts minutemen clashed with redcoats at Lexington and Concord, Sons of Liberty patriots from Warwick, Rhode Island, shot up and torched a British schooner, HMS
Gaspée
, that had been harassing colonial mailboats. Newspapers across the colonies cheered the brazen strike, which exacerbated tensions with England, and Warwick residents celebrate the
Gaspée
affair every June by burning the ship in effigy.
    This rebellious streak dates back to the late 1630s, when Roger Williams, with other like-minded souls banished from Massachusetts because of their faith, established the colony as a haven from persecution. Among those exiled was Mary Dyer, an early heroine in the battle for religious freedom. (The correct spelling of her last name is somewhat elusive; Dyre, Dyer, and Dyar all appear on contemporaneous documents.) Today, a statue honoring Dyer stands in Boston, where she died. But there is no tribute or memorial to her of any kind in Newport, where she lived.
    Described by her peers as “comely”—the Puritans’ uncomely word for “attractive”—Dyer was admitted to the Boston church in December 1635 at the age of twenty-four. She had emigrated from England a year before with her husband, William, but by the spring of 1638 she was cast out of Massachusetts. Her friendship with Anne Hutchinson, who was labeled a heretic for leading unauthorized Bible meetings, had already raised suspicions, and Governor John Winthrop became convinced that Dyer was wicked when he learned that she had prematurely given birth to a deformed, stillborn girl. To prove his case, Winthrop disinterred the tiny corpse that Dyer had secretly buried in grief and shame. “It was of ordinary bigness; it had a face, but no head,” Winthrop wrote in his journal. “The navel and all the belly, with the distinction of the sex, were where the back should be; and … between the shoulders, it had two mouths, and in each of them a piece of redflesh sticking out; it had arms and legs as other children; but, instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl.”
    For her “monster birth,” Dyer was expelled. She and her husband joined Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and other exiles from Massachusetts to found Rhode Island, the first government in the New World to establish freedom of worship as a fundamental human right.
    In 1652 the Dyers traveled to England, where Mary came under the spiritual wing of George Fox and his newly formed Society of Friends, or Quakers. Mary converted and returned to New England in 1657. Her timing couldn’t have been worse. Massachusetts’s new governor, John Endicott (also spelled Endecott), was more intolerant than Winthrop and supported increasingly vituperative punishments against the